Field of the Invention
The present inexpensive invention concerns a pretreated tie device isolated from botanic sources for accelerating the exposure of the inner contents of sealed polyethylene rubbish bags to promote aerobic biodegradation by the native microflora within the natural environment of a common landfill, thereby augmenting the rate of decomposition of such deposited waste mass.
Description of Related Art
Much confusion in the scientific and governmental literature has resulted from the broad, indefinite meaning of the term “biodegradable.” Containers, such a rubbish bags, have been defined as biodegradable whether they are decomposed by fungi and bacteria completely to basic end-products such as carbon dioxide, water, and methane, or to mixtures containing small fragments of polyethylene along with these basic end-products. Such containers may initially be composed of polysaccharides or various combinations of degradable sugars and synthetic organic polymers. These formulations commonly result in more costly and less strong container bags.
Currently, garbage is commonly disposed of in polyethylene rubbish bags sealed with plastic ties which may take several hundred years to degrade by natural means because of the barrier of the degradable contents to landfill microflora created by the bag wall, thereby preventing timely reduction of the landfill mass. As will be noted below, the present bag tie invention involves a pretreated material from natural plant sources which is subject to greatly accelerated decomposition, thereby promoting bag opening and contact exposure of its contents in a common landfill microfloral environment.
US Patent Application 2007/0184239 (Mallory) describes a more complicated web netting to contain yard waste, employing jute twine or paper in its structure. Such an arrangement limits disposal to a composting facility rather than a landfill. In contradistinction, steps are taken in the present invention to enhance the rate of breakdown of natural materials to meet the objectives of the device. Experiments by this inventor have demonstrated that pretreated ties wrapped around a plastic bag and buried in soil typically reach a separation point in about 6 weeks, whereas paper degrades much more slowly. A delay in breakdown would result in deeper deposit loci since the normal processing of landfill sites is to continuously add more layers of soil on sequential deposition of refuse. This would make the garbage bags less exposed to upper layers of deposit, which have higher oxygen contents, than in deeper deposits. The present invention makes special efforts to treat the tie material in order to result in accelerated decomposition, with earlier bag opening following deposition.
US Patent Application 2012/0163736 (caddis, et al) describes a large bag for disposing of trees. Typically, such container products are less strong and more costly than polyethylene bags. U.S. Pat. No. 5,503,883 (1996; Kell, et al.) reports a complex framework of a multilayer paper laminate ring for containing wreaths. Paper is a product made from natural materials but which takes much longer to biodegrade than the pretreated ties described in the present disclosure. The water-soluble packaging in US Patent Application 2006/0281839 (Barthel, et al.) would suffer from decomposition during storage and transport of biomass to a landfill site. The device described in U.S. Pat. No. 8,878,084 (Urakami, et al.) would have little application in the present tie formulation because of cost and complexity.
A device for holding plants on a wire is mentioned in US Patent Application 2009/0183428 (Agullo, et al.). Its application in rubbish disposal is unclear. The closure reported in US Patent Application 2010/0212117 (Haase) describes a compostable tie but is made from a polymeric resin, unlike the natural biological sources in the present application. Its production would be more complicated than the tie described presently and would defeat the goal of keeping costs low. The multilayer gas barrier reported in US Patent Application 2014/0030536 (Krishnaswamy, et al) is made from a polyhydroxyalkanoate polymer blend, rather than directly from a natural material.